A Poet for the People : CARL SANDBURG: A Biography, <i> By Penelope Niven (A Robert Stewart Book / Charles Scribner’s Sons: $29.95; 608 pp., illustrated)</i>

In his later years, Carl Sandbueg was probably the most visible and prosperous poet in America. His earnings and renown, however, owed more to his biography of Abraham Lincoln and his radio and television appearances than to his poetry.

Penelope Niven’s richly detailed, deeply sympathetic biography is welcome not least because it reminds us that Sandburg at his best was an authentic native poet in the Walt Whitman grain. “No other American poet has been so immediately responsive to the convolutions of American life,” Niven writes. “Sandburg’s poetry, deeply rooted in his passionate concern for social justice, is a singular reflection of one man’s participation in his times.”

Sandburg had struggled stubbornly to declare his unique voice and his vernacular free-verse style, which rattled the dovecotes of the genteel tradition in his first Chicago poems in 1914. But the revolutionary was sent to the rear by the next poetic avant-garde, whose alienation, symbolism and complexity made Sandburg seem a bit of a primitive.

The falloff of Sandburg’s reputation among the critics can be attributed in part to his failure to develop in form and theme: He seemed to grow windier as he went on. Robert Frost compared Sandburg’s free verse to playing tennis without a net; William Carlos Williams called Sandburg’s oeuvre a “formless mass.”

Even in his early days, aesthetes grumbled about his weakness for exhortation. When Amy Lowell lectured him about writing propaganda, he agreed with her, but later hit back, saying, “I stressed certain realities that stung my eyes too vividly while she denied some of her most vivid realities.” Sandburg did not blink at stinging “realities”; he created a raw poetic realism of homely eloquence and harsh beauty. As for propaganda, he wrote poems, he said, “hoping that men would act because of his words.”

Such an attitude was not surprising, given his early days as lecturer on the lyceum circuit and organizer for the Wisconsin Democratic Party. He also was a journalist who knew street life firsthand. Such seeming diversions nourished his real work, Niven writes: “His journalism fed his poetry, which colored his biography. His movies stimulated the fertile imagination from which he harvested more poems, children’s stories and newspaper pieces. His work as biographer-historian augmented his work as folk-musician, collector, performer.”

Sandburg sprang from the common people he apotheosized in “The People, Yes.” He was born in Galesburg, Ill., in 1878, the son of Swedish immigrants. The father, August, was a blacksmith’s helper with the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, a hard-working, penny-pinching man to whom Carl was never close. Even the industrious August could not shield his family from the gyrations of the economic cycle. His father’s grinding struggle to survive imbued young Carl with a respect for the endurance of the “little people”--and a burning hatred of the injustice embedded in the capitalist economic system.

Hard times forced Sandburg to leave school and go to work. Unable to settle down and learn a trade, he left Galesburg and bounced about the country, selling stereopticon views, declaiming on the lyceum circuit and writing conventional verse. At various times he also was a hobo, a fireman, a soldier in the Spanish-American War and a government-supported student at Lomlard College in Galesburg.

In 1907, he met his wife Paula, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wisconsin University, a school- teacher and fellow socialist. Sister of the photographer Edward Steichen, who became Sandburg’s lifelong friend and sometime collaborator--most famously on the “Family of Man” photography exhibit--Paula Sandburg devoted herself to her husband, making a home for him to come back to from his wanderings, encouraging his poetic ambitions even when he was embroiled in politics.

In 1912, they moved to Chicago, where Carl roamed the streets as a reporter. Galvanized by the sights and sounds of the crass, hustling, carnivorous city he found his poetic voice, one that was “affirmative of swarming and brawling Democracy,” that would “give back to the people their own lingo.”

In the 1920s, Sandburg turned to other forms, reviewing films for the Chicago Daily News, writing a classic children’s book--”Rootabaga Stories”--finishing “Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years” (published in 1926), compiling “The American Songbag,” a collection of folk ballads he had performed in colleges and social halls across the nation.

He devoted much of his time in the following decade to completing the four-volume sequel, “Abraham Lincoln: The War Years,” which fortuitously appeared on the eve of World War II, when people were looking to the trials of the past for strength to meet the challenges of the present. Sandburg’s Lincoln was as much the product of a poetic imagination as of research, both a figure of myth and mystery and a homespun son of the prairie, of, by and for the people.

Niven is quite informative on Sandburg’s early years, his struggles to write his books, and on his family life, especially his relationship with his wife, to whom he remained married for 60 years until his death in 1967, though he strayed into friendships--apparently platonic--with other women. But by immersing herself in so much domestic detail, she sometimes loses track of Sandburg’s career and scants his inner life.

Sandburg was a protean writer and personality, taking on the coloration of his times--though not out of any cynical calculations of the market. In 1916, he left the socialist movement, apparently disillusioned with political activism, though Niven does not fully explore the reasons. After the United States marched into World War I, flags waving, Sandburg easily shifted from passionate anti-war poems to patriotic philippics. He ater reconsidered and wrote bitterly of the waste of war.

But “Smoke and Steel” in 1920 was, Niven writes, “a last compelling glimpse of the inner man perplexed and disillusioned by the forces of contemporary life.” Henceforth, he submerged himself in the Lincoln myth, American folklore and his self-created mythical demos, the people. “The People, Yes” appeared in the 1930s, in tune with Popular Front Culture.

He had lost some of the kinetic tension between individual and society that energized his best poetry, and he no longer was the tough populist bard who could write of an evangelist: “You slimy bunkshooter, you put a smut on every human blossom.” Or on the occasion of the burial of the Unknown Soldier: “Phantom riders,/skeleton riders on skeleton horses, stems of roses in their teeth . . . grinning along Pennsylvania Avenue. . . . they lay him away--the boy nobody knows the name of--/ . . . under a sky of promises.” For me at least, the young Sandburg, so vividly reincarnated in Niven’s pages, is the most interesting of Sandburg’s multiple selves--the one who vowed early on:

I shall foot it

Down the roadway in the dusk

Where shapes of hunger wander

And the fugitives of pain go by.